WeChat Eyes Singapore Audience, Launches TV Commercial

Tencent’s WeChat messenger has made a larger play for the Singapore market, with the release of a TV commercial in the country.

The Chinese commercial features two popular Taiwanese stars, and will air on the free-to-air Chinese channels in the country.

Louis Song, country manager of Tencent’s international business group for Malaysia and Singapore, said the company hopes to gather more mindshare in the country. “Singapore is a very strong market like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand. We are witnessing a sturdy growth in mobile application platforms,” he said.

Singapore has almost 8 million mobile subscriptions, at a penetration rate of 150 percent of the population, meaning every other person holds more than one phone. Anecdotally however, Whatsapp appears to be more popular in Singapore than WeChat for the moment.

And the 8 million is just a drop in the bucket for WeChat’s current base of 300 million or so subscribers.

The TV ad strategy appears to be one that both WeChat and Japanese competitor, Line, are relying on. Both messaging players recently released TV ads in Indonesia, revealing that the strategy seemed to work well for them in increasing user adoption there.